The American Civil Liberties Union criticized on Jan. 23 a US Justice Department recommendation that 47 Guantánamo Bay inmates should be held indefinitely without trial. Department officials said the men were too dangerous to release, but could not be tried due to insufficient evidence. ACLU director Anthony Romero said their detention would reduce the camp's closure to a "symbolic gesture." (BBC News, Jan. 23)

The US Department of Justice announced Jan. 22 that two Guantánamo Bay detainees have been transferred to Algeria. Hassan Zumiri had spent more than seven years in the Guantánamo detention center, while Adil Hadi al-Jazairi bin Hamlili had been held for five. Both men are Algerian nationals, bringing the total number of Algerians released from Guantánamo to 19. The transfer comes amid criticisms from Republican Congress members after a Department of Defense official stated recently that about one in five detainees have returned to terrorist activities, according to a classified Pentagon report.

World War 4 Report has been keeping a dispassionate record of Barack Obama's moves in dismantling, continuing and escalating (he has done all three) the oppressive apparatus of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) established by the Bush White House. On the first anniversary of his inauguration, we offer the following annotated assessment of which moves have been on balance positive, neutral and negative, and arrive at an overall score:

UK-based human rights group Reprieve issued a statement Jan. 19 suggesting that the Obama administration has suppressed information relating to the investigation of three 2006 Guantánamo Bay suicides and urging further inquiries. The statement comes in response to an article for the upcoming issue of Harper's Magazine, in which former guards at the prison indicate that the three prisoners experienced intense interrogations in a remote area of the base just hours before the deaths. According to the article, military personnel were instructed by a commanding officer that the media would be told that the deaths were suicides.

The federal trial of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman with alleged ties to al-Qaeda, began Jan. 19 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Siddiqui is charged with assault and the attempted murder of a US officer after allegedly opening fire on agents at the Afghan detention facility where she was being held in July 2008. As soon as her trial began, Siddiqui became agitated and started screaming that she was innocent, causing her to be removed from the courtroom. Originally detained in Afghanistan because she was allegedly in possession of explosive chemicals and lists of New York City targets, Siddiqui has denied that she is part of any terrorist plot.

The US Department of Justice announced Jan. 14 that four men have been charged in connection with the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks and an attempted attack on Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper in the ongoing cartoon backlash. The superseding indictment reiterates the 12 charges against Chicago resident and US citizen David Coleman Headley filed last month and adds three defendants.

Lawyers for former Guantánamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani argued Jan. 11 that the charges against their client should be dismissed. Ghailani's lawyers argued before Judge Louis Kaplan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that he was denied the right to a speedy trial while being detained for nearly five years in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secret prisons and later at Guantánamo Bay. (Jurist, Jan. 12)

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit Jan. 8 against the Library of Congress on behalf Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo Bay military commissions. Davis, who was employed at Library's Congressional Research Service (CRS), resigned as the military commissions' chief prosecutor in October 2007 and became an outspoken critic of the commissions, writing articles, giving speeches, and testifying before Congress that the system is fundamentally flawed. In the lawsuit, the ACLU alleges that Davis was terminated by the CRS last year due to opinion pieces about the commissions, in violation of his rights to free speech and due process.